Marion, Norman, and the Collision of Narratives in Psycho

By Jason Haggstrom, June 16, 2010

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films in a career that fostered the creation of many. As with all of Hitchcock’s great films, Psycho can be seen as simple, face value entertainment or as a film worthy of great study and analysis. I’ve seen Psycho many times over the course of my 34 years of existence, but what keeps me coming back is the way that Hitchcock uses multiple narratives to toy with audience perspective. The film begins with an objective narrative before switching to a subjective one only to see that narrative destroyed when it collides with another. This is an analysis of those narratives and how they shape (and re-shape) the way that we view the lead characters and their actions.

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Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan

By Jason Haggstrom, May 21, 2010

In recognition of the 30th anniversary of the release of The Empire Strikes Back, I present my ode to Obi-Wan Kenobi, supreme badass of the Jedi Order:

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Violence as Fetish in Zach Snyder’s Watchmen

By Jason Haggstrom, April 18, 2010

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic book series Watchmen has often been cited as a deconstructionist text.1 By placing his story in a realistic setting and showing his heroes to be flawed, self-serving, nihilistic, and even sociopathic characters, Moore forces his readers to consider whether the archetypical superhero might be better left to the fantasies of fiction. One of Moore’s primary methods in this deconstruction is the use of graphic violence to illustrate the harsh reality of a world populated with superheroes that have no problem taking the law into their own hands and dispensing various forms of vigilante justice. Unfortunately, in creating the film adaptation of Watchmen, director Zach Snyder has elevated the violent aspects of the source text in ways that often alter the thematic purposes that the violence originally represented in the comic series.

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